USA Presidential Election watch - have you got USA Presidential Election
23 watchers
Nov 2016
9:31am, 11 Nov 2016
10,457 posts
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Fenland_Plodder
That probably makes it worse!
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Nov 2016
10:15am, 11 Nov 2016
10,258 posts
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Chrisull
I agree it has changed the climate - especially crap like this where a woman speaking Spanish in the street (a NYT journalist) is abused: twitter.com One part of me thinks though - while this is not right, but let's see these things in broad daylight, expose them to the sun, let them come out, we need to know what we're dealing with. It shows how these prehistoric attitudes are still ingrained and just coz people suppressed them for the last 30 years doesn't mean they went away. We thought we'd won the fight, when we hadn't changed anyone's minds, we'd just shouted them down. Challenge them directly to justify their beliefs. Why is it ok to tell someone to f**k off for speaking Spanish? That position can't be rationally justified. Part of my running coaching course was about getting the athlete to question their own running. Some runners want to be told what to do - yes - but for many, we have to encourage self reflection. Not everybody's mind can be changed. I think the same approach has to be used here. |
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Nov 2016
10:41am, 11 Nov 2016
10,259 posts
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Chrisull
The message is loud and clear here, from a Muslim immigrant on why she supported Trump: "I reject Trump’s “locker room” banter, the idea of a “wall” between the United States and Mexico and a plan to “ban” Muslims. But I trust the United States and don’t buy the political hyperbole — agenda-driven identity politics of its own — that demonized Trump and his supporters. I gently tried to express my thoughts on Twitter but the “Pantsuit revolution” was like a steamroller to any nuanced discourse. If you supported Trump, you had to be a redneck." washingtonpost.com |
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Nov 2016
12:01pm, 11 Nov 2016
10,261 posts
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Chrisull
One last, but sinister fact. Voter suppression. Trump majority Wisconsin: 27,000 Number of voters barred because of voter id law in Wisconsin: 300,000 (Note not all of these barred might have intended to vote, or might have voted Democrat but still it predominantly affected the African american voters). thenation.com |
Nov 2016
12:03pm, 11 Nov 2016
1,480 posts
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Spleen
Ah, so the Americans are also going to get the kind of "surge in hate crime" we had post-Brexit. Every town and city in the world is full of arseholes and drunks, people get abused on the street every day. As runners we know that better than most. What has changed is that whereas previously you would give someone sympathy if they got accosted by some moron, now they get told that it shows the fascists are taking over and they should be very afraid. |
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Nov 2016
12:09pm, 11 Nov 2016
10,459 posts
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Fenland_Plodder
Spleen, good job you don't live in Huntingdon when people had posters put up around where they live telling them to Go Home.
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Nov 2016
12:11pm, 11 Nov 2016
5,828 posts
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paul the builder
I think Brexit supporters / Trump supporters would tell you that the posters were always there; it's just that we didn't notice them before.
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Nov 2016
12:16pm, 11 Nov 2016
1,481 posts
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Spleen
That Nation article is a bit odd. It says 300,000 registered voters "lacked strict forms of voter ID". But the article it links to makes no mention of the 300,000 figure. It mostly focuses on an anecdote about a homeless man who moved from Illinois to Wisconsin in 2015, left it to September 2016 to apply for a Wisconsin photo ID, and then found it would take six to eight weeks to get one unless he drove back to Illinois to get his birth certificate, meaning he would probably miss the election. Sorry, no sympathy. The wheels of bureaucracy grind slowly and they grind exceeding small. This is no different from leaving it to the last second to apply for a passport renewal and claiming it's the government's fault you couldn't go on holiday. If 300,000 people lacked proof of identity that doesn't mean 300,000 people were barred from voting. We can't assume that none of them bothered to apply for proof of identity in good time. |
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Nov 2016
12:17pm, 11 Nov 2016
10,460 posts
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Fenland_Plodder
PtB, yeah, and I also believe in Father Christmas. It seems to me that Brexit has legitimised actions for those that hold those beliefs. |
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Nov 2016
12:58pm, 11 Nov 2016
10,262 posts
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Chrisull
You can dispute the numbers and maybe have no sympathy, but the voter id laws only apply in some states and are specifically legislated by Republican judges. It is a racket, designed to depress the ethnic minority turnout: nytimes.com How did you feel when some Brexit voters were denied their vote because they were wrongly asked for their ballot card??? Presumably that was different? What is the justification for voter id, other than to make it harder (and more expensive) for people to vote? No doubt you would say the massively disproportionate amount of ethnic minorities in jail in America is because they commit, and nothing to do with judges not jailing white people for the same crime. It has been going on since the so called abolition of slavery (which lasted until the second world war, in the form of indentured labour in prison chain gangs, for people who looked wrongly at white women, or were out after 7pm - excellent history of it here - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Slavery-Another-Name-re-enslavement-americans-ebook/dp/B00KFEJLGK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1478868777&sr=8-1&keywords=slavery+another). America still refuses to confront its terrible recent past. |
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